that it
was old: it was a million years too young. No man troubled with the
future, because he knew that it must some day be the past. Religion
hinted at the future: Art alone interpreted the present. Five thousand
years had thrown mud at the workman: Brangwyn proved him the sole
dignified thing left in a dead-level age. For centuries they had
destroyed old ruined tenements, and Bone had shown them to be the only
kind that ought to be allowed. Art dealt with the beautiful and live;
the Church with what was gloomy and decayed. You could not make people
wicked by Act of Parliament; the plain man was an artist when he shaved
his face. Art was to the English what death had been to the Egyptians,
but London was full of things that no one ever spoke about. There was,
for instance, the Imperial Institute. It was better to be beautiful
than dead. Some of those he met were neither. He wished that they
were both. He should be glad if any one would raise objections, for
their mutual advantage. Every one was right and nobody was ever wrong.

There had been ever so much more than that, she knew; but this was all
she could recall when finally he took his seat, and now, already, she
was not altogether sure how it had been connected. She was not by any
means convinced but she was tremendously encouraged. New vistas of an
unsuspected length and freshness opened out from a drab world, whilst
the fat, bearded man was speaking. Sometimes she supposed he must be
very funny?

"Capital, capital," murmured Mr. Alison, and only that. He usually had
such a lot to say, too! She was disappointed.

But now grimly and deliberately there uprose an elderly man of stern
broad face and a respectable frock-coat. He must apologise for letting
his heavy periods drop on the top of the last speaker's brilliant
flippancies, but truth, he regretted to say, was truth.

"That's old Kenyon," her neighbour whispered gleefully.

The doctor, having said so much of calm preface as due to a visitor,
suddenly blazed out into a quicker time and a more violent mood. So
far, he said, from Art being a religion, it was a disease.
(Sensation.) He proved this at some length, largely in the dead
languages, with extracts read from small pamphlets which (he announced)
he had the honour to have contributed to various of the famous
Monthlies.

The soldier-type, he argued, was the most essentially male, 'and it was
furthest-moved from the artistic. He w